Positive Liberty

Some time ago, blog neighbor Jim Anderson took a bunch of half-written posts that he never got around to completing and simply put them all up at once, in a sort of Decorabilia outtakes album.

It was a clever idea that offered a fascinating glimpse into another blogger’s mind. I’ve decided to steal it, shamelessly.

Keep in mind that most of the ideas I’ll present below the fold are not fully formed or thought out. I’m not going to defend them or even speak kind words about some of them. I just needed to clear up some space in my WordPress queue in preparation for the long-term blog series I’m planning on the French Revolution, which I envision starting up in earnest a few months from now, but which I want to get going in the background before I start posting.

So… what follows is enormous, unorganized, and unedited, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Happy hunting.

I have to repress a groan when I hear natural rights described as “nonsense on stilts.” Sure, it’s a wonderful mental image, but it proves nothing, says nothing, is nothing. Nonsense on stilts? It’s to my mind an even more apt description of Burke, when he blathers on about society being a community of souls, born and unborn. Who signed me up for that? And before I was even born? At least natural-rights social contractarians, or their modern incarnations, admit that the social contract is consented to (implicitly) by a living person. (I see now that Anthony de Jasay applied the very same phrase to utilitarians, too: The nonsense — thinking that we could ever do math with aggregate pleasure and pain. The stilts — thinking that we must do it, even if it is fundamentally impossible. Which Bentham himself acknowledged.)

Communism via computer: This article suggests that socialist economic calculation was impossible — before the computer. Afterward, he thinks it may just be possible. Interesting to think that no one is listening anymore. Also interesting to think how the Soviets, who (if calculation worked) presumably would have had the most to gain from computer technology, never really did very much with it. Glimpses of Soviet computer technology here (photos) and here (an entire e-book). A teaser: “It is said that the both buttons have letters on them “L”-left and “R”-right, in order not to mistaken. How often do you confuse mouse buttons?” How indeed.

Bonus irony: Soviet consumer goods in molded plastic had the prices molded directly into the plastic, because prices in the Soviet Union never changed. Which implies — note the prices stamped on Soviet computers — that they weren’t really thinking much about how computers could set all their prices for them. And why would the average economic planner want a computer taking his job, anyway? Much better to do the planning by hand, and to ensure that one’s friends and associates stood to gain the most. A result the computer wouldn’t necessarily reach. Hence molded plastic prices on the Soviet computers — while in the West, probably no single good has changed in price more than computer processing time. And its price has dropped in breathtaking fashion.

Social Contract and the Death Penalty: Why do penalty clauses exist in ordinary (that is, non-social) contracts? Consider my agreement to pay a penalty to a credit card company if I fail to make regular payments. This penalty is asked for, and given, as an inducement to the company to take me as a customer. Its purpose is not to make me suffer, but rather 1) to make the agreement more attractive to the company by discouraging violations and 2) to compensate the company in the event that I break the agreement anyway. Different proportions of 1) and 2) will come into play depending on the severity of the penalty, the rate of interest, and the degree to which I am in arrears. These are beyond the scope of discussion.

But the death penalty, under the social contract, utterly fails at both 1) and 2). It does not compensate anyone in any way whatsoever. Nor does it make the social contract any more attractive to the state, unless the state itself consists of people who enjoy inflicting the death penalty on others. But it is clear that having to administer the death penalty cannot possibly be an attractive feature to any legitimate government, not in the way that credit card penalties are attractive to the issuing company.

Odes and the State: Poet laureates are generally awful. Consider Nahum Tate:

In William Shakespeare’s Richard II he altered the names of the characters, and changed the text so that every scene, to use his own words, was “full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of courts”; but in spite of these precautions The Sicilian Usurper (1681), as his rewrite was called, was suppressed on the third representation on account of a possible political interpretation.

Blech.

Or how about Colley Cibber:

Cibber’s appointment as Poet Laureate in 1730 was widely assumed to be a political rather than artistic honor, and a reward for his untiring support of the controversial Whig Prime Minister Robert Walpole. His verses had no admirers even in his own time, and Cibber acknowledges quite cheerfully in the Apology that he does not himself think much of them. His birthday odes for the Royal family and other duty pieces incumbent on him as Poet Laureate came in for particular scorn, and these offerings would regularly be followed by a flurry of anonymous parodies. In the 20th century, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee considered some of Cibber’s laureate poems funny enough to be included in their classic “anthology of bad verse”, The Stuffed Owl (1930).

Okay, okay, so Dryden was also Poet Laureate… But Pope never was. And let’s not even get started about how they treated the best contemporary poets over in France. Those who wanted to keep writing often had to leave the country.

This is not to say that the State automatically snuffs out creative genius wherever it finds it, or that once you accept the government appointment you suddenly lose any talent you might have had. It’s just that state functionaries have no better taste than the rest of us, and the judgment of the centuries bears this out.

Does It Take Faith to Accept Reason? Blog neighbor Mark Olson has often supported the notion that, to embrace reason — and therefore science — we must first perform an act of faith. Presumably, he means faith in the deductive/empirical process itself.

But even if he were right, this would be a poor argument in favor of any particular religious faith.

Indeed, it is really an argument for nihilism: If we need faith to support either a belief in science or a belief in any particular religion, even while faith itself is essentially an act of a priori will, then there remains no necessary reason to believe in anything in particular.

Think of it this way: Suppose that we start with the premise that all religions require an act of faith, which is really an act of will. Then we agree as well that science and reason are a type of religion, requiring both faith and will for their origins.

What, then, if I happen to will otherwise? Mr. Olson’s will leads him to believe in God, but also to believe in science and reason, and he sometimes finds puzzles or difficulties where the two seem to come into conflict. Fair enough. I, being a creature of free will, do not wish to bother with any of these conflicts. I find them unpleasant in the extreme. I therefore will myself not to believe in either science or God. I reject them both. I put my faith in whatever happens to give me the greatest pleasure in the moment I’m in. Given that all of these — science, religion, nihilistic pleasure-seeking — are acts of faith, why choose any one (or two or three) of them?

What, then, in all of your religion, or all of your science, can convince me to do otherwise? It takes an act of will to accept either one, and my will just isn’t willing.

Two Kinds of Inalienable Rights: Let’s start with the following definition: Inalienable rights are those moral constraints on the behavior of others that cannot properly be negated by any means whatsoever. Even an individual granting consent does not allow another individual to violate his inalienable right, because consent to have one’s inalienable rights violated is never legitimate.

Yet it strikes me that there are two sets of inalienable rights. One set is inalienable simply by human nature; any genuine attempt to alienate such rights would also entail surrendering what it means to be human. Meanwhile, a second set of inalienable rights can be “alienated,” albeit within the context of a society where legal structures make this possible.

The freedom of conscience is a right of the first type. Suppose I were to sign a contract with you to the effect that I surrender my freedom of conscience, and consent to believe anything at all that you tell me to believe. In return, you will provide me a generous annual stipend for as long as I live.

I submit that I would be entirely incapable of upholding my end of the bargain, and indeed that it would be impossible for any human being to do so. For example, let’s suppose you asked me to believe in the Trinity. A number of possibilities exist:

1. I could already believe in the Trinity, in which case the contract does not come into effect, because I have done nothing in the way of changing my belief to conform to yours.

2. I could say I believed in the Trinity, when in my heart I never did and never will. In this case I have not abrogated my freedom of conscience, but exercised it, for the freedom of conscience also implies the freedom to lie.

3. I could try extra hard to believe in the Trinity, when previously I did not. But so long as I fail to believe, I have not fulfilled the terms of the contract.

4. I could refuse to think about the Trinity, forming no opinion one way or the other, meanwhile conforming to your beliefs whenever you or another individual made a demand in that direction. Yet it is hard to see how a person in this situation has any genuine belief in the Trinity.

Lastly, I could succeed at cultivating a belief in the Trinity. But even here, I would argue that the terms of the contract would not be fulfilled. Why not? Because if I ever arrived at a sincere and genuine belief in the Trinity, it would not be through the inducements of the contract, but rather through reason, observation, and whatever other epistemological methods I deemed legitimate. These methods would have nothing to do with your contract. If my methods did have something to do with your contract, then they would fall into categories 2-4 above. And they would not be genuine epistemological processes. (Whether an epistemology is sound or not is a separate question from whether it is or is not indeed an epistemology.)

I would argue that the pursuit of happiness is likewise an inalienable right: I could sign a contract abrogating this pursuit, sure — but then, why did I sign it, if it was not in pursuit of my own (admittedly deluded) happiness?

But there is another sort of inalienable right which seems morally wrong to alienate, yet not actually impossible. We have an inalienable right not to be enslaved, yet it is perfectly possible, under certain legal regimes, to sell oneself into slavery, and no interior constraint can possibly get in the way of it. One can, after all, believe oneself a slave, without any epistemological absurdity.

On Social Sciences and the Game of Go:For years, I have had to restrain a certain mischievous impulse: The tendency to liken a wide array of social phenomena to the game of go. Sometimes that tendency has been so strong that I have been tempted to offer detailed lessons on go to the readers of Positive Liberty, if only so that they may understand what I am getting at. Indeed if I were invited, in good Renaissance style to shape the philosophical, political, and economic education of a wealthy ennobled child, I might almost begin by teaching him, along with reading and writing, the game of go. And then we would proceed to all the rest. I am therefore doubtful how much of the following will make sense to a nonplayer.

Go has a few very simple rules. Here they are, in the most compact form I know:

1. Go is played on a 19×19 square grid of points, by two players called Black and White.
2. Each point on the grid may be colored black, white or empty.
3. A point P, not colored C, is said to reach C, if there is a path of (vertically or horizontally)
adjacent points of P’s color from P to a point of color C.
4. Clearing a color is the process of emptying all points of that color that don’t reach empty.
5. Starting with an empty grid, the players alternate turns, starting with Black.
6. A turn is either a pass; or a move that doesn’t repeat an earlier grid coloring.
7. A move consists of coloring an empty point one’s own color;
then clearing the opponent color, and then clearing one’s own color.
8. The game ends after two consecutive passes.
9. A player’s score is the number of points of her color, plus the number of empty points that reach only her color.
10. The player with the higher score at the end of the game is the winner. Equal scores result in a tie.

And these rules suffice for the entire game: That’s it, and that’s all of it.

One thing that immediately becomes apparent even to the beginner is that while the rules may be simple, they give rise to immediate complications: shicho and life-and-death are examples of what I mean: necessary entailments implicit in the rules themselves that are not apparent at first glance or even by logical thinking about the rules — but that become apparent in practice, that is, when faced with an actual game. (“Lose your first one hundred games of go as quickly as possible,” says the old proverb. Most people do.)

As the rules themselves indicate, the object of go is to win more board territory than one’s opponent. Because your resources are limited — because, that is, you get only as many moves as your opponent, and only so many moves in a game — go is primarily and above all an economic activity: Go is a set of choices under scarcity.

Nor is the similarity between market economics and go merely a mathematical or definitional one: As in a real economy, the best choice is often far from obvious. In an economy, there are very few certain guides to growing wealthy; in go, there are no formulaic answers that will provide you with the definitive move in every situation.

There are, however, principles in both economics and go. In go, these are expressed as proverbs, and the game abounds with them. And given that each is a set of choices under scarcity, there is a great deal of commonality between economic concepts and those to be found in go.

To act in a market, or to make a move in go, is to take an opportunity. Assuming that the rules of the market are fair — note that the rules of go are always fair — the reward goes to the individual who finds the opportunity first. An economist would call this person an “entrepreneur,” and would describe his activity as bringing about a new equilibrium in the market. Meanwhile in go, the proverb “my opponent’s key point is my key point” expresses much the same thing. The opportunity goes to the one who takes it.

And yet. In both the market and the game, each opportunity comes at the cost of failing to do something else, and of allowing that opportunity perhaps to be taken by someone else.

Although no two games are alike, there are regular patterns, called joseki, that appear again and again. Some of the middlegame and endgame joseki appear in almost every single game. Other joseki are so rare and complex that even the greatest masters are unsure how to proceed.

Can those simple rules really encapsulate all of the game? Well… no. As the example of joseki illustrates, the rules are only a beginning.

Likewise, it is possible to derive — given just the rules above — a set of rigorous criteria for determining whether a group of stones can be protected from capture (a “live” group) or whether there’s no hope of saving them (a “dead” group). These rules of life and death, as they are called, are derivative of the above rules, but for most people they are non-intuitive. Oddly, they are also fiendishly difficult to program into a computer. An average go player can often look at a group of stones and determine immediately whether they are alive or dead; looking at the same position, often a computer cannot.

And — delightfully — there are exceptions to the rules of go, situations in which the simple ground rules that create all of this complexity ultimately tie themselves into logical knots. (Go connoisseurs might appreciate this page of examples.) At points like these — relatively rare in go’s multi-thousand-year history — we’re on our own, left to judge as we think best, with the spirit of the game and our own sense of fair play as the only guides.

[At this point my notes say "Bayes' theorem is a useful illustration of these principles." I no longer have the faintest idea why I would have written this. An exercise to the reader, perhaps?]